4 novembre

Re-enabled Yosemite’s translucency for a spin, and now enjoying having to find the CSS hack that allows my header to show through, without which it looks like shit the moment you scroll past the position: fixed cutoff point.

What I find most interesting about Amazon’s Echo is that it’s their first device that doesn’t look like it’s designed primarily to push online purchases. It plays music, that’s it — and that’s almost certainly not the reason for which anyone will buy it. Everything else is pure service. If you had any doubt after the Fire Phone’s unexpected pricing, this seems to confirm that Amazon must be serious about going after Apple.

But before starting to work on next year’s story, which she has not chosen yet, Koenig hopes to find some answers about this one. She wants to find out whether justice was served — and whether Lee’s killer is behind bars or still out there. “I am hopeful that I will figure it out one way or the other,” says Koenig. “I may have to give that up along the way, but today, I’m hopeful.”

Isn’t that at odds with what they said at the launch of the podcast? I had the definite impression that they — or that Ira Glass, when he promoted it in American Life — implied they knew where they were going. Is she lying to build suspense, or did they actually launch into a twelve-week serial report without knowing where it would end up? That seems like it would be a terrible idea.

16 novembre

I don’t necessarily hate on Safari’s “vibrancy” title bar in general — it’s not nearly as weird as Yosemite’s translucent sidebars. But when you scroll down and content disappears behind a website position: fixed header only to reappear blurred above it, it does become really distracting.

So, if your website sports a fixed header and you care about your Mac-based users, I’d urge you to extend your header 100 pixels up beyond the page’s bounds. It’s not gonna hurt anyone, and it’ll look better in Safari. (Quick tip: you need to add -webkit-transform: translateZ(0); to the fixed header for it to show through the title bar.)

The industrial design for the N1 came from Nokia, but the company is no longer in the manufacturing business and has licensed that design — along with its Z Launcher and various intellectual property — to Chinese manufacturer Foxconn, which rather interestingly will handle distribution and sales and customer care, and will even be responsible for liabilities and warranty costs.

Does it sound to anyone else like Foxconn is essentially paying Nokia to take the heat on the iPad mini-cloniness of its new tablet? The tech press might buy the idea, and the public certain will, but somehow I doubt Apple could look at this and go, “Oh well, blame Nokia.” I’m sure that Tim Cook must love the narrative that he saved the company by masterfully offloading all of the supply chain to third-parties, but how much longer can Apple afford not to manufacture its own products when that means subsidizing its entire competition?

Back when Samsung and Nexus phones were much cheaper than iPhones, Android was crappy enough that quality-conscious customers had every reason to stick to Apple devices. But Foxconn is entering the market right at the same time as Lollipop, and that story may play out differently.

So, with all third-party code running on the tethered iPhone for now, jury’s still out on whether the Watch’s OS is based on Swift. (Though I’d argue that the Watch being Swift-only would be the best possible reason why third-party code isn’t allowed to run on it yet.)